In Connecticut, we're used to seeing Beluga whales at Mystic Aquarium, but residents in Fall River, Massachusetts are getting an unusual sight in an unusual place. A Beluga whale was spotted in the Taunton River over the past several days.

"It's very rare to see a Beluga by itself this far south," Dr. Tracy Romano of Mystic Aquarium told WNPR. "It was last sighted here a week ago, on the 18th."

Romano, Mystic Aquarium's Executive Vice President of Research and Zoological Operations, is leading the team while it looks for the whale in the Taunton River. She said Belugas prefer Arctic and sub-arctic waters, and travel in pods. "This unusual sighting in our own back yard is anomalous behavior for a Beluga," she said, "and we would like to find out why."

The torrential rainfall that descended on Oslo on Thursday smashed all historical records, with a colossal 44.5mm of rain falling in just a single hour between four and five on Thursday afternoon.

Water streamed down the city's streets on Thursday afternoon, causing gridlock in much of the city centre, while hailstorms left parts of the city covered in a layer of freak summer ice.

The previous highest rainfall rate the city has seen since records began in 1937 came came in 1980, when 41.5mm of rain fell in an hour over the summer.

"It seems as though we had nearly one month's rainfall in three hours," Marit Helene Jensen told Aftenposten after the rain subsided yesterday evening.

Sweden's meteorological agency SMHI warned of storms hitting the south on Thursday and the town of Mörrum wasn't spared.

"The hailstorm must have lasted about ten minutes and it was absolutely crazy. There was several inches of it on the ground," Göran Odenhammer, father and occasional snowman builder, told The Local.

Odenhammer and his seven-year-old son David ventured outside to inspect the hail and did what comes naturally - have fun in the snow/hail during the Swedish summer.

For decades, climate scientists have tried to explain why ice-age cycles became longer and more intense about 900,000 years ago, switching from 41,000-year cycles to 100,000-year cycles. In a new study in the leading journal Science, researchers found that the deep ocean currents that move heat around the globe stalled or even stopped, possibly due to expanding ice cover in the north. The slowing currents increased carbon dioxide storage in the ocean, leaving less in the atmosphere, which kept temperatures cold and kicked the climate system into a new phase of colder but less frequent ice ages, they hypothesize.

"The oceans started storing more carbon dioxide for a longer period of time," said Leopoldo Pena, the study's lead author, a paleoceanographer at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "Our evidence shows that the oceans played a major role in slowing the pace of ice ages and making them more severe."

The researchers reconstructed the past strength of earth's system of deep-ocean currents by sampling deep-sea sediments off the coast of South Africa, where powerful currents originating in the North Atlantic Ocean pass on their way to Antarctica. How vigorously those currents moved in the past can be inferred by how much North Atlantic water made it that far, as measured by isotope ratios of the element neodymium bearing the signature of North Atlantic seawater. Like a tape recorder, the shells of ancient plankton incorporate this seawater signal through time, allowing scientists to approximate when the currents grew stronger and weaker off South Africa.

They confirmed that over the last 1.2 million years, the conveyor-like currents strengthened during warm periods and weakened during ice ages, as previously thought. But they also discovered that at about 950,000 years ago, ocean circulation weakened significantly and stayed weak for 100,000 years; during that period the planet skipped an interglacial - the warm interval between ice-ages - and when the system recovered it entered a new phase of longer, 100,000-year ice age cycles. After this turning point, the deep ocean currents remain weak during ice ages, and the ice ages themselves become colder, they find.

Heavy rain and hailstones hit Tokyo and surrounding areas on Tuesday. Tokyo's Mitaka City was hit by hail in the afternoon. Some residents say that hailstones of up to 3 centimeters wide fell for about 30 minutes.

It covered residential areas, accumulating up to 10 centimeters. Residents used shovels to remove it from around their homes.

Weather officials say that warm, humid air and a cold air mass made atmospheric conditions unstable, causing cumulonimbus clouds to develop over Tokyo area. Some clouds were more than 10 kilometers high. Powerful updrafts occurred, and that lead to the hailstorm.


Source: NHK

An early freeze in the Great Plains may cut corn production by 8%, according to Simon Atkins, CEO of Advanced Forecasting Corporation, who presented his long-range forecast in a webinar on Monday.

The cause: above-average volcanic eruptions around the world for the last nine months, including three in the last month - in Eastern Russia, Alaska and Indonesia. The release of sulfur into the atmosphere from volcanic eruptions reflects sunlight back out to space.

The meteorologist predicted cooler-than-normal summer temperatures "because of well-above-normal volcanic eruptions going back to the fall of 2013. We are not going to see many hot periods. Sure, there will be a few days here and there where temperatures reach 100 degrees in Oklahoma, but it's not going to be very common."

"What's going to be more common is more moisture coming in off the Eastern seaboard of the U.S., and it will be pushing frontal boundaries from east to west, cooling down even parts of the Midwest in July and August," he continued. "We think the first two weeks of September will be warmer. But then it will be getting quite a bit colder toward the end of September, and even into October."

These cooler temperatures could damage the corn crop, Atkins explained.

"We think there's going to be an early frost [in the Plains west of Kansas], which could reduce the number of bushels per acre of corn - maybe by around 8%, our current rate of prediction," he said. "It will be a killing freeze, at least 10 to 15 days earlier than normal."

Meanwhile, Atkins expects flash flooding in the Midwest this week, from Nebraska down to Arkansas, even reaching into parts of the Tennessee River Valley. "Some of these winds will reach 80 miles per hour with hail, producing lots of flash flooding. Some fields in the Midwest will suffer from too much rain," he said.

The northern Norwegian city of Tromso experienced a freak summer snowfall on Monday after freezing wind from the North Pole saw temperatures plummet.

It was the first time since records began that the city had seen snowfall in June. Local meteorologist Trond Lien said that sleet and snow showers hit the city on Monday night, and there has even been some snow lying on the ground. He said that the situation was "very rare", noting that it must have been a long time since it snowed on 16 June. He added that he had found records showing that Tromso had experienced snowfall in July, but he could find nothing to indicate snow in June.

Motorist Odd Arne Thomassen told reporters that he was driving over roughly four centimetres of snow when he was in Kvaenangsfjellet, in North Troms, early on Monday morning. He explained that it was not bad enough to make him feel he needed his chains on, but that there was certainly about four centimetres lying on the ground.

Yr.no, the weather forecasting venture between the Meteorological Institute and TV station NRK, predicted that other areas of the country would also experience snowfall. It said that high-lying areas of western and southern Norway would likely see snow, despite the fact that the capital Oslo is lapping up temperatures in excess of 20C.

Dr. Christian Schlüchter's discovery of 4,000-year-old chunks of wood at the leading edge of a Swiss glacier was clearly not cheered by many members of the global warming doom-and-gloom science orthodoxy.

This finding indicated that the Alps were pretty nearly glacier-free at that time, disproving accepted theories that they only began retreating after the end of the little ice age in the mid-19th century. As he concluded, the region had once been much warmer than today, with "a wild landscape and wide flowing river."

Dr. Schlüchter's report might have been more conveniently dismissed by the entrenched global warming establishment were it not for his distinguished reputation as a giant in the field of geology and paleoclimatology who has authored/coauthored more than 250 papers and is a professor emeritus at the University of Bern in Switzerland.

Then he made himself even more unpopular thanks to a recent interview titled "Our Society is Fundamentally Dishonest" which appeared in the Swiss publication Der Bund where he criticized the U.N.-dominated institutional climate science hierarchy for extreme tunnel vision and political contamination.

Following the ancient forest evidence discovery Schlüchter became a target of scorn. As he observes in the interview, "I wasn't supposed to find that chunk of wood because I didn't belong to the close-knit circle of Holocene and climate researchers. My findings thus caught many experts off guard: Now an 'amateur' had found something that the [more recent time-focused] Holocene and climate experts should have found."

Other evidence exists that there is really nothing new about dramatic glacier advances and retreats. In fact the Alps were nearly glacier-free again about 2,000 years ago. Schlüchter points out that "the forest line was much higher than it is today; there were hardly any glaciers. Nowhere in the detailed travel accounts from Roman times are glaciers mentioned."

Along with summertime snow

19 June 2014 - On Tuesday, Northern Finland recorded the lowest temperature for this date since 1962, while large swathes of the country awoke to a blanket of white.

With temperatures running 10C (18F) below average for this time of year, parts of Lapland, northern Ostrobothnia and central Finland also saw snow.

The temperature fell to zero as far south as Virrat in Pirkanmaa.

The coldest June temperature in 50 years was recorded in Saanatunturi, Northern Finland, when the mercury dropped to minus 6.2C (20.8F).

During the months of midnight sun in Lapland, weather conditions are generally dry. However, snowfall was also observed in Yli-Ii, north of Oulu on Tuesday morning.

The summer solstice is right around the corner, but winter isn't going down without a fight this year: A bizarre June snowstorm hit Glacier National Park in Montana and parts of Utah and Idaho this week, leaving many residents and visitors in the northern Rockies wondering what season it is.

Glacier National Park saw almost 4 inches (10 centimeters) of rain and more than a foot (0.3 meters) of snow, according to the National Weather Service. [See photos of the surprise snowstorm]

"Weather in northwest Montana and weather in Glacier [National Park] can be so variable, but it's always somewhat exciting, somewhat "wow," somewhat challenging to get this kind of weather this time of year," Denise Germann, a spokeswoman for Glacier National Park, told ABC Montana.

Now, as the snow melts and rivers spill over their banks, the area is at risk for flooding.